We're going to finish the lecture on working with content by going over extracting text from pictures and file printouts. OneNote has the ability to OCR, which is optical character recognition. This means that you can copy text from pictures or file printouts to incorporate in your notes or into other programs as well. So for instance, you could copy the text out of a picture and paste it into a Word document. So I'm going to switch over to a notebook where I've got some pictures. The first option I want to show you is how to extract the text from a printout.

This was a PDF file that I printed into my notebook. To extract the text, you need to do a right click within the picture. And from here, you're going to get your options. Now for this one, because it's a multi page document, I've got two options, copy text from this page to the printout, or copy text from all pages of the printout. For this example, I'm going to do just from this page. So once you click on it, it's going to copy the text out and put it in the clipboard.

So I'm going to go ahead and go over to word. And let's go ahead and paste it. So I'm going to do a Ctrl V. And you'll see I've got my text. Now remember, we're extracting the text so it's not going to take any of the pictures or anything else with it. And it's going to OCR it, which means it's going to go through and it's going to recognize the characters as it sees them. Your OCR is only going to be as good as your printout.

So let's go back to OneNote. Let's go down to my inserted picture. For this one, I took a snapshot of some text from the internet, and I pasted it in here. Again, in order to do the extraction, you're going to do a right click within the picture. We're going to choose Copy text from picture. It copies it to the clipboard.

Now if you wanted to, you could also pay Within your notes, so let's go ahead and do a right click over here and paste. There's the text that it extracted from here. And you can see it looks really good because the text here is very clear. Now let's go to another example. This is a scanned in printout of a receipt. You can see it's kind of fuzzy.

So when you do a right click on this, copy text from picture, let's go below it. Let's go ahead and paste it over here. You're going to see it doesn't OCR it as well, because it's harder to read the characters within the scanned image. So remember, when you're scanning things in, make them as clear as possible. If you need to OCR it, you're always going to have to go back in and do some cleanup. So never take for granted that once you OCR it and paste it elsewhere that it's going to be clean, exact text.

Always go back and prove it because there's usually going to be something wrong with it. It's going to miss Character based upon something that's a little bit blurry or how it envisions that and that's the process for extracting text from images. Remember, go to the image, do a right click and choose your option.